from the January 4, 1995 issue of The Country Chronicle
Hanover, NH–Jurist, professor, author and journalist Henry W. Ehrmann died of heart failure December 25 at Scripps Clinic and Greens Hospital in LaJolla, CA. He was 86.
Professor Ehrmann was born in Berlin in 1908 and studied at the famed French gymnasium in Berlin before earning a degree in law from the University of Freiburg and a doctorate in jurisprudence from the University of Berlin in 1929. He had already become a jurist in Berlin when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Arrested by the Gestapo shortly after, Ehrmann was imprisoned in a concentration camp. With the help of friends and bribery he escaped to the Czech border where he skied over the Sudeten Mountains to freedom.
He worked as a journalist and scholar in France until it fell to the Germans in 1940. Active in helping others escape Hitler, Ehrmann and his wife were the first to use the escape route over the Pyreness Mountains into Spain en route to the United States. After teaching at the New School for Social Research, he directed education programs for German prisoners of war (1943-1947) before joining the faculty of the University of Colorado. In 1961 he joined the Department of Government of Dartmouth College, where he held the Joel Parker Professorship of Law and Political Science and, from 1963-1966, served as the department’s chair. He also taught at the McGill University and held visiting professorships at the universities of Paris, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Mannheim, Berlin, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton and the University of California at Berkeley and at San Diego, where he taught once a year until 1990.
Ehrmann is perhaps best known for his book Politics in France, which in five printings became an academic best seller and was subsequently published in German. He considered his 1957 Organized Business in France (French translation in 1969) to be his major work because, as he said in a 1980 interview at Dartmouth, “in all modesty, it was a new thing and raised new questions.”
The Ehrmanns’ escape to Spain was featured in the recent PBS special The Exiles. As a foreign scholar, he had the unusual distinction of teaching French politics at the Sorbonne. In 1985, Ehrmann was one of three foreign scholars to receive the first honorary doctorates ever awarded by their prestigious Institute D’Etudes Politques in Paris. He also holds honorary degrees from the universities of Mannheim and Hartford. He has donated his extensive scholarly library to Wesleyan University.
He married the former Claire U. Sachs in 1939. He is survived by his wife, of Hanover, and two sons, Michael M. of McLean, VA and Paul L. of Santa Monica, as well as four grandchildren.
Memorial services will be held in the spring at the University of California at San Diego and at Dartmouth. Any memorial gifts should be sent to Amnesty International in New York or The Southern Poverty Law Center in Atlanta.